Here is a list of typical activities a publicist might suggest you do with an interview subject: lunch, coffee, a walk through an interesting neighborhood. Here is a list of atypical activities a publicist might suggest you do with an interview subject: acupuncture, colonics, anything "holistic." And yet this last word is how I found myself getting a vagina steam with YouTube star GloZell Green, who, along with Gwyneth Paltrow, swears by the treatment, which aims to "maintain uterine health," and "stimulate menstrual discharges" and milk production. I assume those benefits come in time, but in that particular moment, it just makes me feel like I have to poop. "We like to say you sit on it like a toilet, but don’t use it like a toilet," the beatific spa attendant jokes. Oh good. She can read my mind.
Green, who is so committed to her trademark color that she wears her green lipstick into the steam room, feels no such anxiety. After the attendant leaves the room, she whips out her contraband cell phone (they’re not allowed outside the locker rooms) and starts filming us for Snapchat. "We’re sitting on these pots kind of things, and the steam comes up and, you know, warms your coin purse," she says. "Your swamp area. Your crotchamus." Green had her first V-steam because she’d heard it was good for fertility, and she and her husband have recently been trying to have a baby. They’ve now got two fertilized eggs in a freezer — she calls them "Glosicles" — and have decided to use a surrogate. But in the meantime, warming her vagina over a hot steam chair isn’t the worst thing she could do on a Thursday morning. "I spared you from the gym," she tells me. "You do not wanna sit there and watch me pretend to be working out."
If you’re not familiar with Green’s online output, most of her videos go something like this: GloZell films herself attempting something ridiculous — swallow a spoonful of cinnamon in a minute, recreate the "Cups" song from Pitch Perfect, eat Pop Rocks while drinking Coke — then hilarity ensues, usually in five minutes or less. It’s simple, but it works. Green’s cinnamon challenge clip has more than 44 million views, her YouTube channel has 3.6 million subscribers, and her videos have been viewed a combined 616 million times.
Asked to explain why her off-the-cuff, off-the-wall videos have such shockingly huge appeal, Green claims it’s because she’s so approachable. "What I hear is that people think of me as their cousin or their sister or somebody they want to hang out with," she says. As for her global fans, "a lot of my comedy is physical, so you don’t have to understand English to get that I’m choking to death on cinnamon or falling out of this tree or whatever."
Green, who’s 42 even though her Wikipedia says she’s 52, was born and raised in Orlando, and holds a BFA in theater from the University of Florida. She moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to pursue a traditional comedy path — stand-up, improv classes, etc. — but didn’t enjoy the late nights, the drunk hecklers, or the hustle. "You don’t get on first; you’re, like, dead last," she says, "or you have to bring people. So I was like, ’This is not it.’" She started doing man-on-the-street interviews with audience members outside The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, putting them on her personal blog. She made the jump to YouTube in 2008 off a tip from a friend. "I was like, ’What is YouTube?’ So I did that." Not long after, she says, her friend said, "Do you know you have a hit?" Titled "My Push-Up Bra Will Help Me Get My Man," that video was the first clip that took off for Green, who not long after got recognized for the first time, at Costco. "This girl just kept staring at me, and I was like, ’What in the world is wrong with her?’" she says. "That’s when I knew, this YouTube thing is something."
Since the push-up bra video, Green has kept up a constant stream of YouTube videos (more than 2,000, by her count), which she films whenever the mood strikes her, usually in one take. She says the platform has helped her figure out who her audience is, as well as what they want to see. "It’s changing all the time, but it used to be just cute little white kids," she tells me. "At the beginning, I thought everybody [who was watching] looked like me. I had a meet-and-greet at a yogurt shop [a while ago]. I went in and this cute little white kid was like, ’GloZell, I love you.’ That’s when I saw that with the Internet, people don’t care what race you are, what color you are, what religion you are. If you’re making someone feel good, that’s it. It would have never happened that way for me in regular Hollywood."
But "regular Hollywood" has come calling anyway. In January, she had a small role in the Kevin Hart vehicle The Wedding Ringer, and she says she’s working on a pilot with Nickelodeon (she can’t get specific, because "the contracts haven’t been signed"). Earlier this spring, she signed with Collective Digital Studio, a digital entertainment company that has worked with YouTube shows like Epic Meal Time and The Annoying Orange. Oh, and she interviewed the president, as part of the White House’s initiative to get "digital natives" more interested in politics. "He’s really quick on his toes, as far as comedy," she says. "He’s got the chance to do stand-up after this whole president thing!"
In the future, she hopes to focus on children’s entertainment, an area that aligns well with her brand of profanity-free, G-rated slapstick. "I always wanted to be on Sesame Street, that kind of a thing," she says, "puppets and fun and original songs and fairy tales." At the moment, though, she’s focused on her Glosicles, one of whom may soon be implanted in a woman whom Green meets for the first time after our V-steams. Within minutes of arriving at lunch with her, Green is Instagramming and tweeting, having told me earlier that she has no plans to slow down after the birth. "That’s when it gets easy!" she says. "Just [have them] do something cute in front of the camera. Spit up, or roll over." Here’s hoping they like green.
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